Staff decks Cypress Hall with Christmassy door decor

It’s Christmastime and Grand Canyon University employees have started the celebration with holiday decorations, hot coffee and cookies and Christmas music. GCU’s big, beautiful Christmas tree towers outside GCU Arena, Papago Hall lacks students, but not Christmas spirit on its walls, and the Colangelo College of Business and other colleges around campus were in a festive mood.

A homey touch by Student Engagement

But the most ornamentation was found in Cypress Hall, where staff brought out Christmas trees, lights, candy canes, stockings, snow and snowmen in a competition this week for the best decorated doors. Categories included most beautiful, most creative, most “reason for the season” and most humorous. (Click here to see a slideshow.) And the winners are:

Most beautiful: Student Engagement dressed up a door to look like a window peeking into a warm living room with a fireplace, stockings and a Christmas tree.

Most creative: Event Services had a door with a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer “in the dark” theme, his two bulging eyes and a red nose popping out from a black background.

Reason for the season: Event Services again, with four gift-wrapped boxes that had these messages — “Family – You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” “God has 4 gifts for you: A Key for every problem, a Light for every shadow, a Plan for every tomorrow and a Joy for every sorrow.” “One of the greatest gifts God gave man is the gift of choice. You have the right to choose to do right or

Inspirational messages on an Event Services door

wrong. But whatever you choose to do, you must deal with the outcome. Therefore, choose to do right.” “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God, which is why we call it the present (from Bil Keane).”

Most humorous: Local and Global Outreach wrapped a door that mocked popular songs and celebrities by placing them in the North Pole.

Among other participants were the Office of Alumni Relations team, with a Grinch Christmas theme, Student Engagement teams with paper fireplaces and their own special touches of decorated cactus, palm trees and group photos, and the Legal Department’s elves reminding one and all, “’Tis the season to be legal.”

The Audio/ Visual team, which worked with the Event Services suite across the hall, created a glowing and festive mini-coffee shop surrounded by laser lights, Christmas songs, a chalkboard with festive messages, dazzling ornaments and a table of two choices of sprinkled or raspberry cookies and hot coffee.

“Welcome to our coffee shop – that’s our theme,” said Maggie Currier, an events coordinator. “We really wanted to let our personalities shine out and create a place for people to come hang out with us because we like when people come visit us, and we all love coffee.”

Well, hey, what about the cookies?

“Honestly, the cookies are shameless bribery for the judges,” Currier admitted.

And, Team IT got technical with a door-sized, three-dimensional snowman made of paper cups, hundreds of staples and toner cartridges for arms.

Stephen Lemster, endpoint operations manager, said the team experienced minor technical difficulties while getting the cups to hold together.

“As you can see, we were performing surgery live,” Lemster added, hoping to hide the evidence by kicking a paper cup behind him. “It took a whole lot of teamwork.”